Network infrastructures, such as computer networks, cellular networks, etc., play a critical role in today's digital age. Network infrastructures utilize network applications that monitor, manage, and manipulate ingress and egress network traffic. Typical jobs performed by network applications to route packets through a network include table lookups, parsing a packet, statistical gathering, packet header and data modification, checksum calculation and validation, packet forwarding/drop, security, traffic policing, and traffic shaping.
Each network application is usually inflexible and written in dedicated software code for implementation on a specific machine, which requires a software developer to possess a deep understanding of the machine architecture. Unfortunately, the increasing demand for high network bandwidth and adaptable connectivity results in network applications that are tremendously complex to meet strict performance requirements for a particular network.